


Only Natural

by MaryPSue



Category: Epic (2013), Guardians of Childhood - William Joyce, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: F/F, Fluff and Angst, Self-Indulgent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-20
Updated: 2016-07-18
Packaged: 2017-12-29 22:09:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1010693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like calls to like.</p><p>The life of the forest attracts the attention of the life of the world. But it's Tara, not just the Queen, who is the reason Seraphina stays.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I have nothing to say for myself. 
> 
> (Okay, I have one thing to say for myself: I accidentally invented a crossover ship and then, tragically, got invested in it.)

It’s not quite like love.

This thing that they share is alien to the love that will have him remember, the love that will have him smile. It’s nothing so human, nothing so finite (for everything that has a beginning must also have an ending). Instead, it is deep and ancient as long-buried roots, and yet always as new and surprising as green spring saplings; as inextricably woven into them as the patterns of growth and decay, irresistible as the tide.

It was Tara who was the first living thing on the new, green Earth to call her not by the name of Mother Nature but an older, half-forgotten one. It was Seraphina who taught Tara the ways of the eternal, terrible balance. Push and pull, light and dark, give and take…life and death. But it was Tara who taught Seraphina that they could be both myth and mortal, that the balance that gives sorrow also brings joy, that to hope would not break her and that it would not be sacrilege to smile.

It feels like sacrilege now.

The storm breaks around Seraphina, unseasonal and unheeded. The small figure in its eye is not Mother Nature, any more than the storm itself is, or the land around her, or the trees whipping wildly in the wind, or the boiling, molten rock that flows thousands of miles under her fists. Somehow, the thought does not hold the same reassurance, the same sense of calm in the face of overriding destiny, that it once had. She is weak and raw as a spring sapling, and the deepest of roots cannot cling to the earth forever.

The rain slicks Seraphina’s hair around her face as she beats the ground with both fists, ignoring the answering rumble from unthinkable fathoms below. Somewhere, out beyond the low-pressure system she’s gathered around herself like a favourite blanket, the balance has tipped, tilted wildly to correct itself. As it always has. As it always will. Golden days must end, whether they span several galaxies or only a small patch of trees.

“Not her too,” the wind howls, in a woman’s voice, when Seraphina finds her throat too choked with sobs to speak. “Not her too.”

It’s not quite like love.

But it’s close enough.


	2. Chapter One

When they first meet, Tara is young and Seraphina is already very, very old.

The passing of the mantle of Queen, the Life of the Forest, catches Seraphina’s attention on each rare occasion that it happens. There have only been three such occurrences in the last millennium, and the flow of power so like her own draws Seraphina like a moth to a light. For just a few moments, the air crackles with the urgency of spring, the soft force that drives roots through concrete and rivers through rock. For just a few moments, everything green and growing seems once again miraculous and new. For just a few moments, anything seems possible.

For just a few moments, Seraphina is no longer alone.

She watches gold swirl through the attendant moonbeams and coil over the heads of the crowd, waiting anxiously to see who will be chosen. It coils over a few heads, before settling at last into a lazy spiral around a slender, dark Leafwoman, whose eyes widen as her light cadet’s armour melts away into a gown of glowing-veined green.

This is all superficial, though. Seraphina and the Queen who even now is passing on her title and duties are the only two in the whole crowd (save, perhaps, the watchful moon) who can see the way that the life of the forest pours into the girl and fills her up from the inside, see the moment her eyes open to the secret world of life and growth. And then, the girl-who-will-become-queen does something completely unprecedented.

She looks up, and meets Seraphina’s eyes.

“Who are you?” the girl asks, and for the first time in millennia, Seraphina says nothing not because she chooses not to speak, but because she can think of nothing to say. The other queens have felt her presence, and some have even heard her voice, but none yet has seen her without her revealing herself to them.

“I am Nature herself,” Seraphina answers at last, as regally as she can manage, once she has collected herself enough to speak. But the twinkle in the eye of the girl-who-will-become-queen, the smile that splits her face, knock Seraphina abruptly off balance again.

“I didn’t ask _what_ you were.”

For the second time in a minute, Seraphina finds herself rendered speechless.

“I’m Tara,” the girl offers, when it becomes clear that Seraphina isn’t going to answer. Unthinking, Seraphina responds in kind, and the brilliant white grin that Tara gives her is well worth it.

“Seraphina,” she repeats, as though rolling the word around on her tongue, and then, “That’s a pretty name.”

Everywhere in a hundred-mile radius of the forest is unseasonably sunny and warm for the next several weeks.

…

It’s the first time anyone on this young, green earth has called Seraphina by name. In the countless eras she has dwelled here, nurturing, shaping, guiding, she has been called by many thousands of names, but she has never held any real hope of hearing the name she was given at birth ever spoken again. (She knows about the crater-cavern of curdled lead, can feel its presence in the earth’s surface just as she feels the ache of absence in her heart, but she holds no hope for him either. Cannot afford to.)

She is Nature. (She is a woman.) The others have always been content with that little knowledge or less. (The others had never looked so boldly upon her, never thought to ask for any more.) The others, try as they might to hide it, had all feared her, just enough to call it awe, or reverence, or respect. (Tara, it seems, fears nothing.)

It is this, as much as any shared affinity for the world around them, that causes Seraphina to return. At first, she only watches, silently, trying to take the measure of the young queen. Watching Tara learn and grow into her powers, discover the rhythm and pulse hidden just below the calm exterior of her forest, brings Seraphina back to her own first days on the young planet. Tara’s delight at the control-that-is-not-control but rather _encouragement_ , the symbiotic entwining of life and life, makes it all new and fresh again for the one who has worn the mantle of life on earth for ten times ten times ten of Tara’s lifespan.

Seraphina learns from observing, as well. She learns that Tara is open and kind and witty, that solemnity comes to her only with great difficulty (but sincerity appears without struggle), that Tara is capable of love vast and deep, and of quite unqueenly mischief.

And, eventually, Seraphina begins to realise she has not herself gone unobserved. She first sees it as a glimmer in Tara’s eye, a flicker of recognition as the young queen glances briefly over the head of the guard she’s speaking to. Seraphina thinks at first that she’s imagining things, but it happens again. And again. When these moments of recognition turn to small, conspiratorial grins flashed in her direction, Seraphina is forced to admit that she hasn’t been as stealthy as she thinks.

And so, it’s not entirely unexpected when Tara finally corners her.

“You’ve been watching me.”

Seraphina considers what to say in response for only a second before calling up a gust of wind to whirl her away, her thoughts tangling themselves up into a muddled, embarrassing knot. She resolves in that instant not to return to Moonhaven, not as herself, not until the sound of Tara’s voice stops sending her into a panic. Even as she makes it, though, Seraphina knows that this is one resolution she is bound to break.

It’s not the first time that Tara’s left her speechless, and Seraphina has an unsettling (but not entirely unpleasant) feeling that it won’t be the last.

 


	3. Chapter 3

“Why won’t you talk to me?”

Tara’s voice is raised, angry. Seraphina’s never heard her sound so gutted, and the sound stops her cold, one hand poised to brush aside the leaf she’d materialized behind.

Whoever Tara is talking to, his response is curt, abrupt, and comes in words so familiar that Seraphina’s fists clench without a thought.

“I have a duty, your majesty.”

“That doesn’t change anything.” The heat in Tara’s voice quickly cools, replaced by something that sounds dangerously close to pleading. “We’ve known each other since we were both only sprouts, we were cadets together -”

“And now you are my Queen.” Seraphina risks a peek around the broad, flat leaves that hide her from view, ducking back after only a glimpse of the armoured Leafman whose military stance and stoic, distant stare call up too many unwelcome memories. “And I am sworn to protect you from all harm. I’m trying to keep you _safe_ , Tara.” His voice cracks on the last word, and the vines of the young queen’s bower shiver and shake.

“Ronin, please. Mab is _gone_ , it’s just me now, with everyone counting on me - I don’t need a guardsman now. I need my _friend_.”

“I can’t, Tara.” His words come out hoarse, rough and raw. “I’m sorry, I _can’t_. I can’t be this close to you when we can’t - when I -” There’s a harsh sound as he clears his throat, and when he speaks again, his voice sounds better controlled, if not actually less emotional. “Permission to be excused, your majesty.”

Tara’s words are like chips of ice. “Granted. You are dismissed.”

Seraphina waits until the sound of measured footsteps die away to step out into the bower. Tara sits slumped in the embrace of a seat hastily woven from a tangle of vines, simple and unlovely but supportive. She looks up, startled, when Seraphina touches her arm, and Seraphina sees that her eyes are shining.

“He won’t even meet my eyes,” Tara says by way of a greeting, and Seraphina drops to her knees to put her face on level with Tara’s. “We’ve been friends for as long as I can remember, I know all of his secrets and he knows mine, and I thought…but now he won’t meet my eyes.”

Seraphina nods, dimly aware that perhaps she should say something. Nothing she can think of would be comforting, though, so instead she only takes Tara’s hands in her own.

“He keeps saying ‘duty’, like it means anything,” Tara continues, and the bite of bitterness in her words makes Seraphina nod in understanding. Rather than speak, though, she reaches up and brushes a lock of Tara’s hair back behind her ear, fingers lingering just a moment too long at the curve of her jaw. Tara smiles, bright as a sunshower, and raises her own hand to press Seraphina’s lovingly against her cheek.

“I won’t leave you,” Seraphina says, wondering why she says it even as the words pass her lips. “Nothing on this earth or above can make me. I promise.”

Tara laughs, and if it sounds too close to a sob, Seraphina doesn’t mention it. “That’s an awful big promise to be making.”

“You have my word,” Seraphina insists, and then, when Tara still looks skeptical, takes the young queen’s face in both hands, gently forcing Tara to meet her eyes. “I won’t leave you.”

She isn’t sure which of them initiates the kiss. All she knows is that Tara’s lips are soft as rose petals and taste fresh as dew, that Tara’s hands are curious and unstoppable as any climbing vine, that every touch is like a tiny spark of that connection Seraphina had felt at the coronation, all the power and vigour of life itself flowing between them.

And even as Tara’s hands tangle in Seraphina’s long hair, even as Seraphina presses a line of kisses punctuated by whispered promises down Tara’s neck, Seraphina can’t quite be sure where one of them ends and the other begins.


	4. Chapter 4

The forest, for Tara, is a vast and magnificent kingdom; still, tethered as she is to the life of it, she cannot leave it. For someone like Tara, someone so utterly fearless and adventurous and filled with wonder at even the most ordinary of things, this is a sentence that cannot always be so easily borne.

(Seraphina thinks about the constellations that make up the night sky, sometimes, about the blaze of star-fire around the mainmasts of ships made to sail the aether, and thinks she understands.)

Tara loves it when Seraphina tells her stories about the other forests, the ones where rain drips constantly from impossibly towering canopies and spiders taller than Tara devour frogs that have never set foot on land, the ones where trees thicker around than all of Moonhaven and the pool that surrounds it stand sentinel over a hush like no other silence heard on earth, the ones where the ground freezes down for miles and scrabbly greenery fights to cling by the tips of its roots all winter long. "I'd love to see it," Tara says, wistfully, once, then catches Seraphina watching her and breaks out into that dazzling smile. "Not that it isn't plenty amazing right here!"

Still, it isn't long after that when Seraphina notices what looks like an attempt to grow a bromeliad lurking at the bottom of Tara's bower.

...

Tara looks up at the first sound of hummingbird wings, and maybe only Seraphina could notice the way the plants of her bower tense around her, prepared at a moment's notice to clench like a fist.

Tara smiles when Seraphina touches down, her bird's wings blowing back the leaves and slenderer stems. "That's not your usual ride."

In answer, Seraphina reaches down from the hummingbird's back, holding out a hand. "I want to take you somewhere."

Tara's eyes narrow, and she gives Seraphina a suspicious look, but her smile doesn't fade as she reaches up to put her hand into Seraphina's. "Okay..."

Seraphina grips Tara's hand tightly, calling up a breath of wind to help her swing Tara up onto the bird's back behind her. Tara gives a surprised shout, before settling onto the bird's back and wrapping both arms around Seraphina's waist. She's very warm, tucked up against Seraphina's back, and Seraphina can feel the strength in Tara's embracing arms, can feel the flutter of Tara's heartbeat against her own ribs.

"Well? What are we waiting for?" Tara laughs, very near Seraphina's ear, and Seraphina presses her heels into the hummingbird's sides, digging her fingers into the feathers at the bird's neck as they rise into the air.

The flight is a long one, even by hummingbird. They fly in the opposite direction of the river, deeper into the forest, until even Tara starts to look a little uncertain of her surroundings. They’re nearing the edge of Tara’s territory when Seraphina finally sets them down, descending through a thickly-woven canopy of leaves and brambles that require some fancy flying to manouever through. By the time they burst clear, Tara is clinging to Seraphina like a vise, though if her whoops and shrieks as they plunge downwards are anything to go by, she’s having the time of her life.

They shoot out the bottom of the canopy, and Tara lets out a gasp. Seraphina can’t help the smile that dances across her face.

“I had to grow it out here, so there was a chance it might actually surprise you,” Seraphina says, as the branches overhead slowly unfold, letting sunlight flood in around them in dappled golden beams. A wave of uncharacteristic shyness sweeps over her at Tara’s silence, and she hears her own voice like a child’s seeking approval. “Do you like it?”

“ _Like_  it?” Tara squeezes Seraphina’s ribcage so hard that Seraphina can feel something pop. Tara leans out over the hummingbird’s wing, perilously close to falling, gazing out over the garden Seraphina has made for her.

She had really pulled out all the stops, Seraphina has to admit. Plants from across six continents spill across the forest floor, slowly unfolding blossoms towards the light as it filters down, weeping willows tangled with prickly pears, pines rising beside banana trees, tiny white arctic flowers framing lush hibiscus. A magnificent cherry tree is the centrepiece, its blooms drifting like a pink snowfall over the ivies and cacti and waving grasses. Their hummingbird swoops between the branches, Tara laughing as she reaches out to run her handsthrough the blossoms. “You brought the whole world here for me? I don’t like it, I  _love_  it.”

Seraphina stares down the hummingbird’s long beak, gently setting them down on a patch of soft, silvery sage that throws up a burst of perfume as Tara swings herself down. She holds up both arms to catch Seraphina as Seraphina slides off the bird’s back herself.

“They can’t all live in the same conditions,” Seraphina says, to the sparkle in Tara’s eye, suddenly afraid that this will look too much like a promise she can’t keep. “They’ll start to wither soon. It won’t last.”

Tara wraps a slender hand around Seraphina’s arm, like a twining vine, fragile but unstoppable. She leans her head against Seraphina’s shoulder, and Seraphina can hear the smile in her voice. “What does?”

...

The garden is long dead by the time Seraphina returns, spindly brown branches scratching and catching at her skirts as she paces. Somewhere, Moonhaven is blossoming, bursting with life and light and celebration. They have a Queen again. The life of the forest has a home again.

The corpses of a thousand flowers crunch pitifully under Seraphina’s knees as she sinks down.

The wind that rattles through the dead branches is as dry as they are, and smells faintly of autumn.

Seraphina isn’t certain how long she sits, knees digging painfully into a multitude of hard, dry stems, letting the wind tug pitifully at her hair. When at last she rises, though, her eye is immediately drawn to the jagged black husk of the cherry tree, and to what rests along its base.

The little alpine flowers should have died with the rest of this, and it looks like most of them have. But there’s a shoot, just two fragile green leaves poking up through the mulch and twining through the bony spines of long-dead ivies, a brave, bright green in the middle of so much death.

Seraphina walks silently over almost without willing it, as though she’s being guided gently by a hand she can’t see. This time, when she kneels, her shoulders do not shake, her hands reach down to cup the two insolent leaves.

There’s a sound behind her, the snap of a dry branch underfoot, and Seraphina whirls, to see her own shock mirrored on the face of the armoured Leafman she remembers always standing at Tara’s side, never smiling - “Ronin?”

For the first time since Seraphina had first laid eyes on him, he seems shaken, struck to the core by some horror or grief too deep for any roots to hold against it. “I - the flowers, the ones that led me here, I thought - that was  _you?_ ” His hand snaps down to rest on the hilt of his sword, and Seraphina can see him buckling himself back into an invisible suit of armour, drawing himself up. “Who  _are_  you?”

“It’s all right,” Seraphina says, rising slowly, like the tide, her dress pooling around her feet. Kneeling there, with her back to him, gowned in green and with her long, dark hair...she can see why he was shaken. “My name is Seraphina. I loved her too.”

The wind that rattles through the dead branches is still dry, but it carries the faintest hint of spring rain.


End file.
